Okay, so I just built a Witch from Mercury model, and it was a dud. So what better way to wash the taste out of my mouth than by rolling the dice and building another Witch from Mercury model that may or may not have similar flaws?

This is the Desultor, yet another Premium Bandai GWitch release that a lot of people wish wasn’t Premium Bandai.

Spoiler Preface!!!

This post contains some massive spoilers from the middle of Witch From Mercury. You may want to skip it if you haven’t watched the show.

About the Mobile Suit

Here is what the instruction manual states:

During the early days of mobile suit development, many companies focused on improving the connection between the pilot and the machine, or in other words, using humans as software.
In contrast to this, Jeturk Heavy Machinery prioritized developing hardware that would be practical in combat and wouldn't demand as much skill from the pilot. The Desultor was created from this design philosophy.
Equipped with armaments that allowed it to operate in a wide variety of combat situations, this unit proved the effectiveness of mobile suits as weapons.
During the raid on Plant Quetta in Ad Stella 122, the anti-Spacian organization known as Dawn of Fold used several Desultors that had been illegally obtained. While the Desultor was considered obsolete by some in this era, its reliable combat capabilities had yet to become outdated, and it was still seeing active deployments in battlefields across the galaxy.

Among Jeturk Heavy Machinery’s many mobile suit designs, the Desultor in particular seems to scratch an itch for a lot of folks, and it’s not hard to see why. I’ve said before that Jeturk’s designs are the most Zeonic looking in all of GWitch, but the Desultor arguably takes the cake. In so many ways, it is the Ad Stella timeline’s equivalent to the Zaku II.

It’s got the monoeye, it’s got the green color scheme, and it’s highly adaptable and configurable with a variety of different weapon and equipment configurations. While other Jeturk designs are much more fancy and ostentatious in their design, the Desultor feels like a true workhorse grunt of a mobile suit, just like the Zaku. It’s no wonder people love it so much.

Spartan Look

With the green color scheme and that gold colored visor, the Desultor also looks like another famous and iconic character as well:

Which isn't to say that people like it simply because it resembles the [Master Chief](https://www.halopedia.org/John-117), but rather that "military man in olive drab robot armor" is just a good design.

Appearances

Despite being such a cool design, sadly we only see the Desultor in a single episode. The silver lining is that it makes the most of its screentime.

As stated in the instruction manual, terrorist organization Dawn of Fold uses a Desultor squad during its attack on the Plant Quetta space station. The choice in MS was very intentional, as the group hoped that their use would frame Jeturk Heavy Machinery as being involved in the plot (and thus throwing the scent off the real masterminds).

And you know, they do a pretty good job terrorist’ing! They manage to destroy a bunch of ships, and then drop off a squad of commandos inside the Plant to carry out an assassination attempt.

But after that comes the scene that made the Desultor truly iconic. A bunch of folks inside the Plant decide that they need to fight back, including company president Vim Jeturk. Vim heads out in a Dilanza Sol to attack the transport ship that Dawn of Fold arrived in.

However, little did he know that the ship was carrying hostages, including his own son (and my man) Guel, who had run away from home, went incognito, and got a blue collar job.

*~~Guel~~ Bob moments before his life changes for the worse*

Under attack, and after hearing that a certain rival might be at the Plant, Guel deploys in one of the Desultors left on the transport ship, and unknowingly engages in combat with his father. And while he was in an older mobile suit, Guel is a darn good pilot, and well …

… he unintentionally engages in patricide …

It’s a huge moment in the show, the repercussions of which reverberate throughout the rest of the story. But it also proved that despite its age, the Desultor was still a beast of a grunt suit.

Weapons and Stuff

We see the Desultor squad using all sorts of stuff throughout the episode, including a machine gun:

*Apparently it’s a big no-no to use ballistic weapons in outer space, but Dawn of Fold doesn’t give a rip*

A bazooka:

A shoulder mounted missile launcher:

A back mounted missile launcher that I could have sworn they used in the show, but which I couldn’t find a screenshot of:

A back mounted troop transport that carries the commandos:

And lastly, a close combat blade that deploys from the wrist like the hidden blades in Assassin’s Creed:

About the Model Kit

It is entirely possible that this was a Premium Bandai release because they didn’t think it would sell well enough to the mass market, but I wonder if maybe it’s also because this kit comes with all of the weapons and accessories that we see in the episode:

It is quite the spread, far more than what you might get from a typical High Grade release (save for some Zakus, which sometimes do come with a lot of stuff)

Beyond that, I have no idea what this build is going to be like. I have my guesses based on all of the other GWitch kits I’ve put together, but maybe it will surprise me. At the very least it can’t be worse than the last one, right?

… right ?!?? …